Sulayman al-Isa

Sulayman al-Isa was born in 1921 in the village of Nuayriyya, near Antioch, in the sanjak that Syria would lose in 1939. His father ran the village Koranic school and had him learn by heart the Koran, the Mu'allaqat and thousands of lines of verse; he was already composing at about nine. Driven from his region with his family, he finished his studies in Hama, Latakia and Damascus, was imprisoned for his poems, and took part, while still very young, in the founding of the Baath party. The defeat of June 1967 turned him toward children. Winner of the Lotus Prize in 1982, he entered the Arab Academy of Damascus in 1990 and died in 2013.

In the catalogue 1

• Poetryغنوا يا أطفالSulayman al-Isa · 1979not translated into EnglishLiterature